Il Palazzo di Everything > The Museum of Everything Opens its Doors in Venice @Musevery > 29th of May till July 28th

With over 500,000 visitors to its installations since 2009, The Museum of Everything is the world famous wandering institution for the untrained, undiscovered, unintentional and unclassifiable artists of our modern times.

On 29th May 2013, The Museum of Everything will open Il Palazzo di Everything, an Official Collateral Event of the 55th Venice Biennale - which includes over a dozen self-taught artists historically championed by the museum.

In celebration, The Museum of Everything will unveil an installation of fifty paintings by one of the most important self-taught Italian artists of the 20th century: Carlo Zinelli (1916–1974), born 100km from Venice.

During his lifetime, Zinelli’s visual autobiography was celebrated by Jean Dubuffet, André Breton and Dino Buzzati, yet these rarely seen gouaches were created in the studio of a local hospital, where the artist lived after returning from the Spanish Civil War with shell-shock.

The Museum of Everything’s Zinelli retrospective is not simply about the rediscovery of an essential modern artist - it is about notions of otherness in the history of art, about what art is and who an artist can be.

Carlo Zinelli 1916-1974

Born in San Giovanni Lupatoto, near Verona, Carlo Zinelli spent his early years working on the land as a labourer following the death of his mother. At the age of eighteen, he was enlisted to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he endured severe shell-shock on the front line and returned unable to speak or recount in any way the horrors he had experienced.

In 1947 Zinelli was encouraged to move to accommodation at a hospital in San Giacomo, where the sculptor Michael Noble had initiated an art studio to enable patients to draw, paint and sculpt. Zinelli lobbied to be included and, once accepted, dedicated his life to painting.

Working up to eight hours daily, Zinelli began to create a bold individualistic body of work, where impressionistic recreations of the landscapes and characters of his youth were set against the brutal backdrop of war. Zinelli‘s swirling double-sided works were brought to the attention of la Compagnie de l’Art Brut by his psychiatrist, Professor Vittorio Andreoli. They went onto form a central part of the collection and are today being rediscovered by a new generation of artists, curators and collectors.

The Salon of Everything > welcomes all to open-platform

Can we call something art even when its maker does not? Is there a difference between private and public art-making? Are self-taught and nondestinational artists/non-artists the missing link in contemporary art?

The Museum of Everything invites all to participate in the self-taught revolution at The Salon of Everything: a free-form rolling conversation with leading artists, curators, writers and thinkers - every afternoon at Il Palazzo di Everything and documented in conjunction with the BBC.

For details, please visit www.musevery.com, or come to Serra dei Giardini in between the Giardini and Arsenale, where you can also find The Café of Everything - the only happening bar and eaterie close to the Giardini.